MHF Tech Show Episode 18 Show Notes

credits: Thanks to Cabeeno Rossley for the sound effects.

A big shout to our friends at Apex hosting limited, Volly-co data centres and Jeppesen Warren. A big MHF hello to Matthew Potter, Edward Fox, Ben Roberts and finally todd cochrane thank you for all your support.

The News:

Microsoft have released the release preview of Windows 8. You can download it right now Join us next time when we give you our first impressions.

The Humble Indie Bundle is back yet again. For a limited time, you can get four games and set the price you want to pay and choose how much of your money goes to developers and charities. If you pay over the average, then you will unlock the fifth game as well.

O2 customers suspected of illegally sharing porno films made by british Ben Dover Productions will begin receiving letters from the film-maker shortly.

The firm won a court order in March forcing O2 to pass on details of the owners of 9,124 IP addresses linked to illegal downloads. The High Court has now approved the text of the message that will be sent. Ben Dover has said its focus is on users who had uploaded films to others.

Facebook has suffered a series of service disruptions which left many people unable to use the social network. The problems meant that the site was unreachable for some people for almost two hours. Sporadic disruptions were reported by many people and even those who could get through said pages were taking a long time to load. Facebook apologised but said it had fixed the problem.

Into the Past:

In today’s edition of Into The Past, we had a look at the Sega Mega Drive(AKA Sega Genesis.

The Sega CD was announced at the Chicago CES in June 1992 (20 years ago this month). It was capable of full-motion video clips and had CD audio soundtracks. Because of the Genesis’s limited color palette and limited data bandwidth, motion video was heavily choopy and slow and usually limited to a small boxin the center of the screen.

In Europe the Mega-CD was released in April 1993. 60,000 of the 70,000 Mega-CDs shipped to Europe were sold by August 1993. It was was designed to compete with the PC Engine CD in the us and the Commodore CD32 system in europe so whats underneath the hood?

The main CPU is a 12.5-MHz 16-bit Motorola 68000 processor. The Mega Drive has the same processor, but at a lower clock rate of 7.67 MHz (NTSC) / 7.61 MHz (PAL). In the combined system, both processors run concurrently for Mega-CD games, and the Mega-CD processor is idle for Mega Drive games.

Graphics

Graphics Processor: Custom ASIC
Number of simultaneous colors on screen: 64 out of 512
Display resolution: 320 × 224 pixels and 256 × 224, video size from ¼ to full screen
Cinepak video compression scheme, implemented in software
Scaling and rotation effects

RAM

Main Program RAM: 512 kbyte (upgrade from the Mega Drive’s 64 kbyte)
Shared Program RAM: 256 kbyte (Linking the Mega-CD CPU with Mega Drive’s CPU)
PCM samples: 512 kbit
CD-ROM data cache: 128 kbit
64 kbit Internal Backup RAM (for storing saved games, scores, etc. for CD games)

Storage

500 MB CD-ROM discs (equivalent to 62 minutes of audio data)
CD-ROM drive transfer rate: 150 kB/s (1x)

BIOS

Size: 1 MBit
Used for games, CD player, CD+G and karaoke
Access time: 800 ms

The Mega-CD adds the Ricoh RF5C164 chip, which gives 8 extra sound channels, all capable of sampled sounds, to the Mega Drive’s YM2612 and SN76489chips (which provide a total of 18 channels, with the YM2612′s 6 channels and PSG’s 4). The drive did not have a board-level connection with the audio and required an additional connection to mix the sounds from the console and the drive (later version addressed this deficiency).

Sound format: Stereo PCM
Clock frequency of source: Up to 12 MHz
Sound channels: 8
Maximum sample rate: 32 kHz (44.1 kHz for CD-DA)
Wave data width: 8 bits
16 bit DAC
8x internal over-sampling digital filter

At the time these were amazing specs in comparison to NEC’s PC Engine its greatest rival at the time with a maximum of 64 sprits on-screen,512 colours, 6 pcm audio channels , its CPU was 8-bit HuC6280A with a Commodore’s 6502 16 bit Varityire and a dedicated dual GPU.

So if you want to get hold of one of these for yourself, then you can probably pick one up for under £100 on Amazon or eBay.

Picks of The Week:

Adi’s pick of the week was handbrake

Let’s face it, some of us out there have DVD movies that we want to convert for playing on our iPad, Android tablet or something else. with handbrake, you can throw your favourite DVD into your computer, select the type of conversion you want. From there, handbrake will go and do it’s work. I recently did this with one of the films I owned and it worked a charm. I was able to play a film that I owned on my phone with no problems.

Now here are the legalities. In the US and the UK, you can legally use Handbrake to convert your original DVD movies that you own to a format that is playable on your devices. However, you will need to check the laws in your respective country with regards to DVD ripping.

Handbrake is free to download and is available for Linux, Mac and Windows.

Chris’ Pick of the Week is the Xyloband. It’s a flashing bluetooth wristband and the essential item for any concert goer. They are essentially radio controlled wide range bluetooth receivers which is connected to a strap of LEDs that flash as white, green, red, blue and pink.

The speed of flashing and sequence vary’s depending on the song being played or controller. You can operate them from a laptop providing you have the specified cable connected to a transmitter box when using the proprietary software that can be downloaded from the makers at xylobands.com.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestion, then feel free to email us at mhftechnet@gmail.com . Get those emails in right now and who knows? We may read your emails on the show.